Handley Sees Mental Health Counseling As Part Of His Job
In addition to his many years of experience in law enforcement, Buena Vista Police Chief Wayne Handley has brought something somewhat unique to his service to the community – a doctorate degree in mental health counselor education.
“I’m the first one to tell you that just because you have a Ph.D. doesn’t mean you know anything about anything,” he told The News-Gazette with a small chuckle before continuing. “But it does mean that I put this effort in to learn as much as possible so I could be better at my job. Not just as a therapist, but to be better at my job [as a police officer] because we work with people who are under stress and exposed to trauma all the time.”
Handley began pursuing the degree in 2014, while he was serving in the Norfolk Police Department. In May of that year, a Norfolk officer was shot and killed along with another citizen, and the officer who confronted the suspect got into an altercation which ended in the officer shooting and killing the suspect. Handley was one of the officers assigned to conduct the debriefs from the incident, due to his having some experience through a crisis intervention team program and a very basic peer counseling program.
It was during that time that he realized he “really had a desire to be more involved with mental health.” He was in the process of pursuing a master’s degree in business administration at Old Dominion University, and he went first to the university’s psychology department, and was then directed to the counseling department where he spoke to a professor about the field.
“She was fabulous,” Handley recalled. “She really kind of enlightened me to what mental health counseling was about, and I was like, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be in the room with the person. I want to be working with groups. I want to be helping people.’”
Switching Majors
Handley enrolled in his first counseling class soon after to see what it was like and “after the first two or three weeks, I was hooked,” and he dropped out of the business administration program and began pursuing his master’s degree in mental health counseling.
“It was not something I ever thought [I’d be interested in], but the more I did it, the more I thought, ‘This is where I belong.’ I really like this work. It’s very rewarding [and] it’s very satisfying.”
Handley earned his master’s degree in 2018 and then began working on his doctorate, defending his dissertation in May 2024. He passed the National Counselor’s Exam in April and has submitted an application to the Virginia Board of Counseling for his license. He told The News-Gazette in an email this week that he hopes to have his Licensed Professional Counselor designation in July.
Handley’s doctoral dissertation was on the impact of adverse childhood experiences on resilience in police officers, a topic he chose due to his desire to work with public safety personnel, including firefighters, EMS providers and dispatchers – who Handley noted are “often forgotten too much” – in addition to police officers.
“There’s a level of cultural competence that helps therapists working with that population,” he said. “You don’t have to be a cop to counsel a cop. I try to tell police officers that all the time. There are great therapists out there that really do a good job, but they just take a little bit longer to build a rapport. I can sit down and talk with a police officer and have very similar experiences, so rapport building takes a lot less time.”
Throughout his program, Handley said he learned things that changed his point of view on the world, including gaining a better understanding of the concept of privilege, which is a word he feels “gets thrown around in a way that does a disservice to the actual concept.”
The lesson that led to this shift began during a class about academic careers with doctorate degrees, during which the professor spoke about the things she had to go through to obtain tenure.
“She was talking about … the things that she had to go through that her male counterparts did not, that other people did not, just because of who she was, the way she looked, political ideology, things like that,” he said. “She had to jump through so many hoops and at the end of that [lecture], I looked at her and was like, ‘I’m furious on your behalf. There’s no way I would ever do things like that. There is no way I would jump through all those damn hoops for tenure for a job like this. That’s just not reasonable.’ And she kind of looked at me and she kind of smiled and just kind of laughed it off.”
Handley then went home and was talking to his wife, Megan Zwisohn, a career prosecutor who currently serves as the senior assistant commonwealth attorney for Rockbridge County, about what had happened.
“I told her, ‘I can’t believe that this doctor had to do this…I would never do that,’” he said. “And my wife looked at me and said, ‘And you don’t have to, because look at you. Look at the population you fit into. You have privilege. You don’t have to do those things.’
“That hit me like a stone, and it changed how I look at things. That was such a profound experience to me that it really made a difference in how I look at groups, individuals, environments [and] programs. I just look at them differently, and I think ‘Okay, where am I coming from and where is everyone else coming from.’”
Learning To Empathize
That lesson was a small part of one of the biggest things Handley said he took from the program – the ability to better empathize with people and be more aware of the situations and environments around them.
“I sit with some people and I disagree with them flat out,” he said. “[We have] different political perspectives, different economic ideas, but I will also at the same time, temper that with ‘Where is this person coming from? What is their experience? What has motivated them to think this way or behave this way?’ because if I understand that better, I might change my mind. I might just flat out be like ‘You know what, I’ve been wrong all these years, and maybe I should look at things from a different perspective.’ I try to do that with each person and each group that I come into contact with.
“It just makes you a better person, and that’s what matters – being a good person, understanding where people are coming from, and being able to articulate it,” he continued. “I think a lot of people can look at another person and say ‘Well they’re just having a bad day because’ or maybe they just have a gut feeling, but to be able to articulate it to an audience or write it out in an article or a paper that your peers and your colleagues will read and then take under advisement and think ‘Maybe we should start doing this. Maybe we should start doing these things.’ It’s kind of a call to action, how do we start these programs small, they gain traction and then they start to spread.”
Responding To Trauma
As part of that call to action, Handley has begun working on developing a Critical Incident Stress Management program that will train police officers for basic peer support, which will serve not just Buena Vista, but also Lexington and Rockbridge County. The officers who train for this will be going through various levels of peer support, including active listening skills and understanding the physical and emotional responses to trauma, to be able to help their fellow officers should they experience any sort of traumatic event, whether it be a car accident, a shooting, or just the stress of the job.
“They’re not psychiatrists, they’re not therapists, but what they do have is an enhanced understanding of what it means to interact with someone who’s having a problem,” Handley said. “On its face, you might look at it and be like ‘That’s just two people having a conversation,’ which is partly true. That conversation, though, is very deliberate. The person who is the peer support person knows what they’re getting themselves into and listens and tries to understand where their peer is coming from and helps them navigate through the stress of what that situation might be so they’re healthier on the other end.”
The program is currently in the grant proposal phase, with a goal of utilizing grant funding to start and sustain the program for the first year or two. After that, the plan is to either get additional grant funding or financial input from the other departments in the area. Handley noted in an email to The News-Gazette that the cost for maintaining a program like this is minimal, largely centering around additional training for members and some administrative costs. He is confident that the program can get off the ground this year.
Handley also networks with other police chiefs around the country at various conferences, which he said allows him the opportunity to “get on a bigger stage and speak to people that should know these things, should be doing these things, but really aren’t doing them.”
Throughout the past decade of earning his degrees, Handley says he’s learned a lot of different things.
“I learned a lot about myself,” he said. “I learned a lot about how police officers think and feel and work. And I believe it’s provided me the opportunity to make an impact in my chosen profession that will hopefully last beyond my time here, [and] that I can create an environment where people really take these things seriously and really want to put the energy and motivation and resources behind them so that we can create better public safety agencies, which ultimately leads to better service for the community.”
